Monarch butterfly isolated on white with soft shadow

A thistle to Waukee City Councilman Shane Blanchard for a decidedly antisocial use of social media. Waukee city officials had been wondering about a "Jim Buchamen" who had been taking jabs at members of the council on Facebook. Turns out there is no Buchamen. It was a name created by Blanchard to create a fictitious Facebook account where he made anonymous comments - some during the last election in which he won re-election to a second term. When confronted by the Register's Timothy Meinch, Blanchard admitted his deception and said, "It was something stupid I did. I regret it and I've moved on." Not all Waukee City Council members, or citizens, may have moved on, however. People can be as nasty as they want to be on the Internet, but when running for public office, candidates should have the courage to say what they believe using their real names.

A rose to the memory of Ann Cook, a retired Omaha teacher, who left a legacy of learning for residents her hometown. Cook, who died last month at the age of 70, left her entire $2.5 million estate to the Council Bluffs Public Library Foundation. The idea of a teacher amassing such an estate may come as a surprise, but the fact that she left it to the library should not. "She was a great reader," longtime Council Bluffs librarian Mildred Smock told the Council Bluffs Nonpareil. Smock, who retired in 1992, recalled that, as a young girl, Cook was in the library nearly weekly, mostly checking out fiction to read for pleasure. If that joy of reading can be passed on to other children who venture into the library, that will be a gift of immeasurable value.

A rose to Iowa State University engineering students who built a smart-phone application that tracks butterflies. Before writing this off as a silly academic exercise, read on. Butterflies are more than just colorful garden visitors. They are also harbingers of environmental change, and we need to know more about the distribution of butterfly populations around the world. But "there's just not enough people out there looking for butterflies," Nathan Brockman, curator of the Reiman Gardens' butterfly wing, told the Ames Tribune. "One way, because there's not enough for paid professionals, is to use citizen scientists." The other problem is the data that is collected is not standardized. Thus, ISU computer engineering students were recruited to build a phone app that puts standardized data-collection tool in the hands of amateurs and scientists around the world. Thanks to this software project, if a butterfly flaps its wings in some part of the world, someone with a cell phone might just be there to capture all of the details.